The purpose of this paper is to analyse the stability properties of a class of multistep methods for second kind Volterra integral equations. Our approach follows the usual analysis in which the kernel function is a priori restricted to a special class of test functions. We consider the class of finitely decomposable kernels. Stability conditions will be derived and compared with those obtained with the simple test equation. It turns out that the new criteria are more severe than the conventional conditions. The practical value is tested by numerical experiments with the trapezoidal rule.